I thought that 1.7.4 was going to be just another incremental update, but small things sometimes add up to form a surprisingly larger whole.

Here are some of the highlights since 1.7.3:

The structure of the discussion thread send-email creates when sending a re-rolled series (i.e. with In-Reply-To) is finally made much saner. Earlier, everything including the cover letter was made into a direct response to the previous round, but now only the cover letter becomes a direct response, and everything else becomes a response to the cover letter for the current round.

Bash-completion is usable with Bash-4, which broke completion of --option=with-value of our earlier implementation.

Tab-width used in whitespace breakage checking can be configured via the attributes mechanism. Earlier, we insisted that a Tab had to be 8 places everywhere.

The merge machinery can now be told to merge branches ignoring various whitespace changes.

The fetch command learned to recurse into submodules, reducing the need to use "submodule update". It will be a longer-term trend to roll submodule-awareness into more basic commands, and this is one of the steps in that direction.

<tree>:<path> notation to name a blob or a subtree can be told to take the current directory relative to the top of the current working tree by prefixing <path> part with "./", e.g. "HEAD:./Makefile" when you are in "drivers/" subdirectory names the blob at "drivers/Makefile" in the current commit.

Pickaxe search "log -S<string>", which was designed for scripted use, met a more human-friendly cousin "log -G<regexp>". While "-S<string>" is about counting the number of appearance of <string> in the file before and after the change and reporting when they differ, "-G<regexp>" looks at the actual patch text and reports if a line that matches <regexp> appears as either added or deleted, allowing detection of simply moving a matching line in a file, which "-S<string>" was not designed to do.

Reviewing the list of updates, you would notice (and hopefully, be pleasantly surprised) that there are quite a few user-visible usability enhancements.